Back from Milford SF

[jacey]

I'm tired out, but it was a great week full of fascinating people, mind-blowing ideas (almost literally) and about 160,000 words of intense critting. Twelve writers, 25 pieces of writing, 25 hours of formal critting and who-knows-how-many-hours of reading. The standard was scarily high. mevennen , bluehairsue , maeve_the_red  and chrisbutler  were all there, plus some old faces and some new.

Chocolate and alcohol featured in varying amounts. Much useful information was shared. Post-crit discussions continued to chew over stories and ideas. Meal-time discussions often turned gory and at one point we realised that the Welsh language class - which came in on Tuesday morning and stayed for lunch - had gone very quiet just as bluehairsue  was expounding on cannibalism.

Trigonos - the centre where the week is held - is a fabulous place with its own frontage on to a Welsh lake with Snowdon peeking up in the distance and the Nantlle Ridge looming up above. This is the view from the main house down to the water. Wherever you point your camera you come up with a magnificent landscape - even in the wet. It's not a hotel, but it's very comfortable and the atmosphere is welcoming and easy-going.


The only slight drawback (for me, but not for others I hasten to add) is the centre's food policy - excellent and totally praiseworthy in theory as it's sustainable (mostly from their own garden), but it's vegetarian with a strong vegan bias and sadly not really to my taste (or my digestive system's) as I'm a) not vegetarian b) definitely NOT vegan and c) not keen on vegetables except when served up with meat/fish and lots of gravy/sauce, veggie or otherwise - and cooked with SALT (please!). Breakfast was toast/cereal/fruits etc. so no complaints there. Lunches were fine (delicious home made soups). Starving was impossible because there were also yummy cakes with afternoon tea plus delightful desserts at dinner. But sadly the main courses for dinner diverged from my definition of food.  No one else seemed to worry, but root vegetables al-dente aren't my thing. Crunchy green veg is grea, but I find crunchy potato and swede less appealing. I feel guilty for griping because the chef took great pride in his cuisine and for many people it's one of Trigonos' plus points. Also he very kindly made me other stuff when pulses or peppers were dish du jour. Unfortunately my idea of comfort food is shepherds pie and his is roast courgette and tomato with brown rice. Nuff said?.

Anyhow, I came home and made liver, bacon and onions casseroled in rich gravy. Ah! Much better. It's not the meat I miss, it's the gravy.

Comments

[julesjones]

The problem for me is that I am a supertaster with IBS -- and people who specialise in vegetarian and particularly vegan cookery tend to be extremely heavy-handed with flavourings that taste foul to me in anything but what a friend refers to as homeopathic quantities. Add that to the enthusiasm for brown everything cereals-wise (wheat bran is a very strong trigger, brown rice isn't good either), and simply avoiding the pulses isn't going to do it. It's just too complicated to find something edible in a strongly vegan-orientated cuisine for that length of time, especially if I don't have the option of going off to find a takeaway.

Which is a severe annoyance, because I happen to *like* a lot of vegetarian food, including various things I can't eat nowadays unless I'm prepared to spend the next two or three days taking immodium. :-/

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The only reason I didn't have the option of going off to find a takeaway was that we are a one car family and so in order to leave Best Beloved with transport I generally catch a lift if possible. Therefore I've never had my own car there.

There was always white bread at breakfast as well as wholemeal bread and some specialist bread (an oat bread or a gluten free one, I think) but the rice did tend to be brown as no one had specified otherwise.

Breakfast was delightful, in fact. A wide choice of toasts, a wide choice of preserves or nut butters or yeast-based spreads and a choice of different fruits from prunes to grapefruits and yoghurt. There was also a board of sliced cheese of the Emmenthal/Edam variety. I think I scared them the year I took my own jar of Bovril.
:-)

Lunches were great, too. Always a home made soup, quiche or (veggie) sausage plait or pate with home made bread and a choice of freshly made salads. I mostly just pigged out on the soup.

[julesjones]

Ah, if there's at least white bread and preserves/cheese available, that makes it a *lot* more practical, even if I have to live on cheese sandwiches for the week. It is actually possible for me to live on a vegetarian diet for a few weeks if the cook is willing to eschew brown flour and rice, as I proved last year when I stayed with a friend while I flat-hunted -- although poor kalypos_v was getting a bit desperate for new recipe ideas by the time I left.

We are currently a zero car family, me having carefully selected a flat based on its walking distance to a bus route with a bus every five minutes in rush hour to where Best Beloved works. :-) We still haven't got around to buying a car, on the grounds that we can hire one for a weekend every month for the same price as the cost of owning one. So for now I plan cons etc on the basis that I will be confined to the site and its immediate environs.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The no-car thing makes sense if you can walk to work and to local shops. Living in Birdsedge I have no access to local services without a car. I can't even go to the post office without driving.

There's a bus into Huddersfield but the buses home again are placed so that you either get twenty minutes or three hours in town and the journey takes nearly an hour each way because the bus winds through every village imaginable.